The reference in it to Engle vs. Vitale takes me back to college days when I had to write a paper on the subject. That was in my inchoate pre-ACLU days when Justice Hugo Black was a hero. I excuse the waywardness of my youth pertaining to the subject of church and state to a pesky libertarian streak which has to some degree been thankfully mugged by reality.
And goes back further.
In a letter to Samuel Miller, Jefferson also wrote, "Certainly, no power to prescribe any religious exercise, or to assume authority in religious discipline, has been delegated to the General Government. It must then rest with the States, as far is it can be in any human authority."[21][22]
In 1998, the FBI’s crime lab examined Jefferson's letter, uncovering words deleted by the president (nearly 30 percent of the draft) prior to publication. This, along with other evidence, indicates that Jefferson’s pledge to separate church and state was at least partly political motivated.
James H. Hutson, head of the library’s manuscripts collection, stated, "It will be of considerable interest in assessing the credibility of the Danbury Baptist letter as a tool of constitutional interpretation to know, as we now do, that it was written as a partisan counterpunch, aimed by Jefferson below the belt of enemies who were tormenting him more than a decade after the First Amendment was composed."[23]
Jefferson’s letter and the FBI’s restoration work are among the items in an exhibit at the Library of Congress called, "Religion and the Founding of the American Republic." The exhibit also notes that Jefferson began to attend worship services held at the House of Representatives two days after writing the letter, and that he permitted regular worship services to be held there, a practice that continued until after the Civil War, with preachers from every Protestant denomination appearing there.http://www.conservapedia.com/Separation_of_church_and_state